CATEGORIES

NEW CHAPTER

Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?

STUCK ON YOU

Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.

HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG

Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.

CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS

The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives

THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON

Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.

THE HOME FRONT

Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.

SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED

Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.

THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE

Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.

THE ARTIFICIAL STATE

A different kind of machine politics.

LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES

Go with the flow like a dead fish.

BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS

How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.

TUCKER EVERLASTING

Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.

The Puppet Masters - Compulsion, complicity, and the art of Bunraku.

The National Bunraku Theatre, in New York recently for the first time in more than thirty years, presented an evening of suicides. The performance, at the Japan Society, consisted of excerpts from two of the company’s most celebrated productions. In the Fire Watchtower scene from “The Greengrocer’s Daughter,” by Suga Sensuke and Matsuda Wakichi, from 1773, the titular character sacrifices herself to save a temple page boy she loves. In a scene from “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki,” by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, from 1703, two lovers are driven to take their own lives. Both plays were inspired by real events, and Chikamatsu’s was followed by a wave of double suicides that led to a ban on further performances. This mirroring of life and art is all the more astonishing given the fact that the actors are not people but puppets.

TAKE ME HOME

The filmmaker Mati Diop turns her gaze on plundered art.

THE BIG DEAL

Joe Biden's economic policies are starting to transform America. Will anyone notice?

EACH MORTAL THING

What other creatures understand about death.

THE LAST MILE

The aid workers who risk their lives to bring relief to Gaza.

A PIECE OF HER MIND

Does the Enlightenment’s great female intellect need rescuing?

SONGS OF WAR

Early on in “Blitz,” Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan), a London factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son, George (Elliott Heffernan), aboard a train. Rather, George puts himself aboard; he twists angrily free of his mother’s grasp—“I hate you!” he cries—and tears off down the platform.

From the Wilderness

One morning in the rainy season, I went to bed at 6 a.m. after working all night and was on the verge of falling asleep when I was startled by the sound of my father’s voice coming through the air-conditioner next to my bed.

STAR-CROSSED

“Sunset Blud.” and Romeo Juliet,” on Broadway.

You Are Going to Die - Oliver Burkeman has become an unlikely self-help guru by reminding everyone of their mortality.

"The average human lifespan," Oliver Burkeman begins his 2021 megabest seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, "is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." In that relatively brief period, he does not want you to maximize your output at work or optimize your leisure activities for supreme enjoyment. He does not want you to wake up at 5 a.m. or block out your schedule in a strictly labeled timeline.

PARENT-TEACHER CONFERENCE

Hi, Billy's dad! Andrew, right? Thanks for meeting on such short notice. No, don't worry, this actually isn't about Billy.

PURCHASING POWER

What do the biggest donors to Donald Trump's campaign expect to get in return?

CITY OF GOD

The Met’ revelatory show on Siena.

WAR DOGS

The facility lies two miles away from the main terminals but within the grounds of the airport, at the end of a service road that skirts a pond where geese flock during their migrations.

CLOSED CHAMBERS

What can memoirs by Supreme Court Justices teach us?

FOREIGN INFLUENCERS

How the U.S.government decides when to alert the public about election meddling.

PIVOTAL, SEMINAL, RARE

He built an empire in high-end books. Then a rock star pressed charges.

ALPHA GIRLS

Inside the tight-knit world of Kamala Harris's sorority.